Investigation on a Novel Direct Liquid Fuel Cell Feeding on Oxalyl Dihydrazide

Abstract

Direct liquid fuel cells (DLFCs) are promising candidates for portable applications, because they have high energy density which means long runtime, high energy efficiency, and don’t require time-consuming recharging. At present, several types of DLFCs have been invented such as Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFCs), Direct Formic Acid Fuel Cells (DFAFCs), Direct Sodium Borohydride Fuel Cells (DSBFCs), Direct Hydrazine Fuel Cells (DHFCs) and so on. In this work, we propose a novel direct liquid fuel cell feeding on oxalyl dihydrazide which presents as solid power at room temperature and can be easily dissolved in alkali solution, without any emitting toxic gases. Several potential anode catalysts such as Pt/C, PtRu/C and Au/C are evaluated using a three-electrode cell. The results show that Pt/C is more suitable for the electrochemical oxidation of oxalyl dihydrazide than PtRu/C and Au/C. Using Pt/C as anode catalyst, we designed and fabricated two types of Membrane Electrode Assemblies (MEAs) of different structure, one-catalyst-layer MEA (MEA-1CL) and two-catalyst-layer MEA (MEA-2CL). The single cell tests show MEA-2CL obtain higher I–V performance.